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The Accidental Leader

Last Updated on April 7, 2017

As of this week, I am the leader of my church’s men’s group.

No snickering out there.&nbsp  No need.&nbsp  I’ve already taken care of your share of that myself.

I’m actually the group’s third leader since it began about nine months ago.&nbsp  The guy who started the group severely injured his back and wasn’t able to continue.&nbsp  Another member, who happens to be one of my accountability partners and a very close friend, took over the group from there.

He just accepted a different responsibility with the church: he’s now helping lead a new youth program.

So now it comes to me.

When Gerald R. Ford assumed the presidency following Richard Nixon’s resignation in August of 1974, Ford was referred to as “the accidental president.”&nbsp  So I couldn’t help borrowing the phrase for my situation.

One of the first things I wanted to talk about was the news of a Georgia pastor who abruptly stepped down from his church after admitting that he had committed adultery with a church staff member.&nbsp  A friend of his, one week ago today, read his letter of resignation and explanation to his church’s congregation.&nbsp  You can read the letter for yourself at the pastor’s website, here.

Geoff Surratt, one of the pastors of a different church here in Charleston, wrote a blog post of his own about the situation: in “An Open Letter to Pastors,” he talks about how pastors can avoid the same fate in their own lives.

It seems to me that Surratt’s five points, all of which essentially take the form of, “You know you’re already toast when…”, could also apply to those of us who are not pastors and who probably never will be.

After all, as devastating as it can be to loyal parishioners to find out that their pastor has taken a moral fall, those people are already in a church, already seeking a spiritual nourishment and hopefully finding something there that satisfies them.&nbsp  If the church responds the way it should, that nourishment should continue, along with extra encouragement and time spent teaching about compassion and understanding in the wake of such a revelation.

As Christians, we are around people all day in our workplace and in our personal lives who are not in church, and may have no desire to be.&nbsp  If they know we’re Christians, everything we do is potentially being scrutinized.&nbsp  The way we deal with crises when they come up, the way we deal with co-workers when problems arise, even our work ethic affects a non-Christian’s view of what Christianity is all about.

A pastor has an extra responsibility not to screw up.&nbsp  But the rest of us can do just as good a job at giving the cross a black eye.

I love one of the last lines in Surratt’s post:

“You don’t wake up one day and decide to shipwreck your life. You do it one stupid decision at a time.”

We’re going to make stupid decisions.&nbsp  But if we utilize the kind of safeguards Surratt talks about and give ourselves that “extra chance” to weigh the results of what we’re doing, maybe we’ll at least reduce the number of them we make.

the authorPatrick
Patrick is a Christian with more than 30 years experience in professional writing, producing and marketing. His professional background also includes social media, reporting for broadcast television and the web, directing, videography and photography. He enjoys getting to know people over coffee and spending time with his dog.